This invention relates generally to social networking, and more particularly to determining advertising effectiveness among social network users for advertisements outside of a social networking system.
To determine the effectiveness of advertising, typically polls are issued to groups of people exposed to an advertisement or an advertising campaign, and to a control group of people not exposed to the same advertisement or campaign, who may be similar in other respects. However, in the context of users of a social networking system and advertising exposure outside of the social networking system, often there is not a readily available way to determine the exposed and control groups.
In a typical social networking system, such as a social networking website, users set up their user profiles and then establish connections with other users of the social networking system. The users often provide information about themselves expressly to the social networking system, such as demographic information and/or a list of the users' interests. Users may also provide information about themselves implicitly to the social networking system, through their actions on the system and interactions with other users. In this way, a social networking system can obtain a rich set of social information about its users, which may be used in a great many ways to enhance a user's experience online.
Users of a social networking system may be exposed to various online advertisements. If they occur within the social networking system, these exposures may be tracked by the social networking system. The social information about the users maintained by the social networking system may provide a rich set of data about the users and their exposures. However, advertisers typically cannot leverage this social information in the contact of advertising impressions that occur outside of the social networking system, and thus cannot use the information to determine the effectiveness of advertising.